Small Website Fixes that Could Mean Big Results
Is your website still not producing results despite your recent optimization and marketing efforts?
If so, there’s no need to feel singled out or defeated as we continue to come across many businesses experiencing the same thing.
In this article we will outline some small website fixes that could mean big results for your website. The best part is that most of these fixes should be relatively simple and inexpensive too.
When Does a Website Need “Fixing”?
Before we dig into some website fixes that could get your site producing better results we want to make sure that your website needs fixing in the first place.
There are a lot of benchmarks and milestones that companies will use to dictate where to spend their time / money optimizing their website. These could consist of any or all of the following:
- Traffic (total visitors and unique visitors)
- Traffic by source (organic, social, referral and paid traffic)
- Usability (bounce rate and page load time)
- Engagement (bounce rate and average time on site)
- Content (top landing pages and top exit pages)
- Conversions (goals, events and transactions)
Despite all of these different ways to determine the “success” of your website though, there is really only one primary metric that should sway you when it comes to investing time / money into fixing your website…
Revenue.
Is your website making you money?
If your website is not making you money, then it most likely needs attention. Increases in organic traffic, decreases in bounce rate and more social media shares are all nice to have, but if these milestones are not leading to more revenue, then they really just become vanity metrics.
So, no matter if your website’s purpose is to rack up page views to appease advertisers or go viral on social media channels to build brand awareness, if it’s not supporting and growing your business, then it needs some fixing.
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Leave your website URL in the COMMENTS BELOW with a reason as to why you think your website needs fixing. We will provide our input based solely off of our first visit to your website.
Common Website Fixes that You Should Already Know
We don’t want to assume that you’re already familiar with the most commonly overlooked website fixes so we are going to cover these first.
After you’ve had a chance to knock out these common mistakes, then you can address the lesser known fixes that may be holding your site back.
On-Page Optimization Mistakes
- Title Tags are too long, nondescript and repeated across multiple pages
- Meta Description is too long, uninteresting, not actionable and is duplicated or missing from multiple pages
- Image ALT attributes are missing entirely or stuffed with unnecessary, irrelevant keywords
Usability Mistakes
- Flash is being used on the website to feature content and navigation options
- Mobile-friendly is ignored completely as visitors struggle to navigate or view your website on their different mobile devices
- Below the fold is where you have placed important content or calls to action – right where most may never see them
Conversion Optimization Mistakes
- Navigation is too complicated, hard to find, has too many drop downs or just has too many options
- Calls to Action are nowhere to be found, not unique and not relevant to the target audience being driven to the site
- Contact Forms ask for too much information, require too many fields and don’t provide any privacy reassurances
Small Website Fixes You Probably Missed
If your website is free of the 9 common mistakes outlined above, then you should be getting some decent results.
If you’re still not getting the results your business needs, then your website may be guilty of some less known oversights.
The only good thing about these mistakes is that most, if not all, of them can be resolved relatively quickly and inexpensively to deliver some noticeable results in a short amount of time.
Let’s take a look at some of the website elements that continue to get misused, abused or ignored….even after conversion rate optimization.
Social Media Icons
Just about every website you come across now has social media icons somewhere throughout the site. We’re not talking about social media action buttons that allow you to like, tweet or pin something on a web page, but rather the simple icons that link to a company’s social media accounts.
“Thank You” Pages
Even though every website visitor is very valuable we continue to see websites that do not maximize each and every opportunity. One of the most common oversights we see is sites not using “thank you” pages to keep visitors engaged after they convert or purchase something.
Site Search
Is there anything more frustrating than trying to use a site’s search feature only to keep getting irrelevant results – or worse yet, no results at all? There are so many sites, especially e-commerce sites that are still guilty of this oversight.
Copyright Date
Quite possibly the easiest thing to fix seems to be the one most overlooked – a website’s copyright date (usually in the footer). Now, when it comes to importance, this oversight is low on the priority list, but for the discerning few visitors that do get confused / turned off by an “old” copyright date, this could chase someone away.
Contact and Location Information
Even if a business has not had the time or resources yet to make their website mobile-friendly, there is no excuse to ignore proper use of contact and location information. When we see this information either missing, incredibly hard to find or included as part of a big image we cringe because we know other users get frustrated as we do.
404 Pages
If you have a growing site or one with a lot of content, then a link or two will break at some point. And even if you don’t your visitors will find a way to get to a page that doesn’t exist. Knowing these things we still see a lot of sites that don’t maximize their 404 pages or don’t even use them at all and just let visitors get to a default error page.
SSL Certificates
Improper use and management of SSL certificates is still a common, but often forgotten, problem of many websites. The funny thing is that most users don’t notice if a site is secure, but they will absolutely know when it is not secure as browsers are very good at warning users.
Blog Post Dates
Ah, the good old published date. Having dates of when your blog posts were published can be a huge plus or a big mistake. Many websites continue to misuse the published on dates for their blog posts and are losing return visitors as a result.
It’s the Little Things that Count
You won’t ever come across a perfect website. If you think you have, then please share it with us in the comments below
With that said, there are many things that require little to no investment or technical expertise that many websites still seem to forget about. Don’t let your website fall into that boat.
The 9 common mistakes and the 8 lesser known oversights are all things that you and your team could probably take care of in a couple days of work, if that.
Just knowing these things and giving them a little attention can very well lead to a better performing website – as we have seen in numerous cases where we have helped to fix these elements for some of our clients.
So now you’ve got a checklist of some low-hanging fruit to address to improve your website.
And if you don’t have any technical expertise or resources and need some help taking care of these things, then we would love to help.
Need a hand knocking out these fixes or even finding others that need attention?
Don’t forget to share this post!
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